Recently, email and instant messaging (IM) have become commonplace in digital communications. Additionally, cellular telephones have also become ubiquitous in society. Thus, many people carry multiple devices, such as cellular telephones, email-enabled personal digital assistants (PDAs), etc. in order to keep abreast of all of their incoming communications.
In an effort to integrate these various communication systems (e.g., public switched telephone network (PSTN) systems, cellular telephone systems, email systems, etc.), various vendors have created “unified messaging systems.” Those unified messaging systems provide a centralized repository, which stores messages such as, for example, telephone calls, email messages, etc. The centralized storage of messages provides users access to various communication modalities (e.g., email, voicemail, etc.) through a single user interface.
Unfortunately, the integration of the various communication systems comes at a significant cost to the vendors because, typically, the integration requires vendors to modify the various individual communication systems. For example, in order to create a unified messaging system that is compatible with both email and telephony, both the underlying architectures of the telephone system and email system are modified as the unified messaging platform is constructed. The modification of the underlying component systems results in a complex architecture that is susceptible to communication errors.
Thus, a heretofore-unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.